Public transport | The wedding was suddenly interrupted in Suomenlinna – the reason was HSL’s confusing information

“Celebratory a sizeable annoyance”, describes the person who served as bestman Micke Lindholm journey from Suomenlinna to the mainland.

The wedding, which took place on the island on the first Saturday of May, came to an earlier conclusion than planned due to insufficient information from Helsinki Region Transport (HSL).

Lindholm wrote also to Helsingin Sanomat’s opinion column.

Lindholm, who acted as best man and master of ceremonies at the wedding, says that the organizers of the party noticed already during the day that HSL had informed about disruptions in ferry traffic. According to the notification about the technical fault, weekday schedules were in use.

However, the reduced shift intervals did not hinder the arrangements any more, and the party started in the afternoon as planned.

“Then in the middle of the night we noticed that the error message was still on,” says Lindholm.

In summer, the last ferry leaves for Kauppatori at two in the morning, also on weekdays. Now, however, the revelers were no longer sure about which time of the year the ferries would run according to the timetables, when longer shift intervals were in use.

The summer timetables had come into force earlier in the same week. However, the route guide showed that the last ferry left in the last couple of days already at 00:20, says Lindholm.

Party crowd started looking for information as much as possible in the middle of the night. One called the operator, the other went to look at the paper schedules on the platform.

Only parking spaces could be reserved from the number used by the operator, and customer service could not be contacted at night. On the other hand, no dates could be found in the timetables of the pier, and there were others on the beach wondering about it, says Lindholm.

The scraps of information did not form such a reliable overall picture that one would have dared to calculate the journey home of dozens of people.

“As wedding organizers, we simply couldn’t take the risk that the gang would stay there in Suomenlinna,” says Lindholm.

“We stopped the party and decided that now everyone should go to the ferry beach.”

of HSL information manager responsible manager Joona Packalén admits that the information went wrong in this case.

Packalén says that one of the ferries broke down on Saturday, which is why the ferry service was switched to fewer shifts. The thinning did not affect the start and end of traffic.

“Probably in that rush, the important thing was left unsaid, that the first and last ferry leave at exactly the same time as normal,” says Packalén.

The lack of this information led to confusion among passengers.

“You can raise your hand to indicate a mistake.”

In situations, where individual trains are cancelled, according to Packalén, the passenger can rely on the information in the route guide, especially for the first and last departure of the day.

If the changes to the schedules are large, the entire list of changes cannot be updated in the route guide. However, changes to the first and last output are mentioned separately in error situations.